[Haskell-cafe] Packages

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 23:38:16 -0700 Don Stewart wrote:

...

And by now you know where which distro has it:

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=18343

I'm sorry, Don, but you're late... Gentoo had it last night (as soon as Matthew told me he uploaded it to Hackage)! ;-)

I'm sorry, I'm confused... 1. How is putting something into a Cabal package different from just handing somebody the source code and telling them to run ghc --make? 2. If we already have a Cabal package, why do we also need seperate packages for Arch, Gentoo, Debian...? Isn't Cabal cross-platform? 3. Why isn't any of this explained in print anywhere?